Dear Diary, Dante and I share a smoke and everything is a little clearer now

Dear Diary, sorry to have been away so long.  I've been spending time with my friend, Lamy Vista, I think I mentioned her before.  You know how it is.  And helping out a bit somewhere else.  Sort of important.

Anyway, I shared a little smoke with Dante this morning and he remindid me I really ought to say something. So here I am:

Last weekend, at our place, after we'd returned home from our sojourns, James Guido, el zorro plateado, or, I guess, really la volpe argentata, cooked a beatiful tuna over carmelized onions and a balsamic vinegar reduction, and broccoli rabe and a dish his mother used to make that's like a pizza rustica without the pastry. Lori made a salad with green olives and sassy almonds and she made a monster goat-cheese cake with a crushed brittle topping, and I made mushroom & fontina pizza for everyone to start with. R&E brought fabu wines & chocolates & a special guest, P&K brought bubbles galore. It was a great night, but here's why I'm really mentioning it: there were fishetarians in the house, so I couldn't put any slices of my cured duck breast on the pizza. Bubububutttt, I'd made enough dough and prepared enough mushroom to make another pizza the next day & did & lavished it with deep dark duck which got deeper and darker after 7 minutes of hot hot hot. And the next day after that I made a side of Brussels sprouts & figs with cubed up little pancetta-like ducky.

There. Sometimes it's all about the duck. Because sometimes all the other stories go somewhere else.

Oh - one other thing. The Losers' Lounge 60th Birthday tribute to Karen Carpenter at Joes Pub was (and will be again tonight) absolutely killer. Killer.  Absolutely On Top Of The World.

Question Your Outer Dante garden sculpture, now available

Thank you, statue.com.  Along the way I also enjoyed Jayhan's moneygami, and Mark McCloud's blotterbarn.

100223 hat moon Dante plague-doctor

(When I posted this image last night I neglected to say that the handwriting in the background is Banjo Paterson's manuscript of Waltzing Matilda.  Thank you, Roger Clarke.)

100222

It's been a difficult couple of days

 

But we're back.  Thank ye.

Oh, the damned tree in front of our house what broke our 10 year old sidewalk

 

Oh, and I walked home after Megan O'Leary made me a hot toddy at Bar Toto, and I saw the snow hanging down so heavy on the damned tree what broke our sidewalk that I'd already shoveled three times today catching on the cracks and nearly breaking my wrists, and I thought, Damn that tree, I hope the wet heavy snow snaps it like a twig! 

(And I'd have taken a better picture of it, but I wouldn't lay down in the wet snow for it.)

Hold for Lewis

When I was reading Ruhlman and he kept referring to McGee, I thought, Oh, yeah, I've seen that book...  And when I was rummaging around yesterday for the big Beard (guidance needed re sourdough), Oh, yeah, look, there's the McGee, right next to the Beard.  And when I took it off the shelf and opened it, there was this bookmark in it from Book Court, and on the back of the bookmark was Hold for Lewis 1/6/05.
So, once upon a time, exactly 5 years and one month before pulling it off my shelf yesterday, Lota or I wanted the McGee badly enough to special order it.  Maybe I even started reading it before.  The bookmark was inserted in the section on milk chemistry.  (I sat down with the book and started reading it from the beginning, got weirdly to just about exactly the point where I'd found the bookmark, stuck the bookmark back in, and wandered off muttering about hairy milk proteins having their negatively charged tips sheared of to get all curdlike.) I'm gonna look on that shelf again today to see what else it remembers for me. 

Self-Enervation; it's consequences and treatment

Well, I was indulging in one of my favorite pastimes this morning - browsing the the collection at Making of America, thank you very much - when I came across  Doctor Eldridge's book.  And, yes, I've started reading it.  Oh!

That it is one of the most prolific causes of insanity known to the human race, is well attested by the history of hundreds that are annually admitted and provided for within the walls of our eleemosynary institutions. Out of eight hundred and sixteen cases of insanity in the New York State Lunatic Asylum, there were one hundred and seven masturbators. This ratio seems astonishingly great, but it is nevertheless true, as the fearful records afforded by other institutions, prove the alarming correctness of our statement.

No mention that the figure is closer to 100% for people outside the the walls of the eleemosynary institutions.  Substitute "bloggers", "tweeters", or "facebookers" for the M word?

This week cooking - 7 days & 7 nights preparations

Dear diary, give blood give blood, give blood give blood...

(Rain Machine - Give Blood - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.)

Dear diary, woof woof woof, January's going out like it came in, all action packed.  Joseph Arthur and Bobby Bare Jr. and Antipop Consortium and Kyp Malone's Rain Machine.  (I'd been singing Monk at the Disco in my head from the wee hours of Saturday morning until Mr. Malone blew it out of there last evening.)

Yes, Rain Machine blew my mind, but can we talk about something even more important?  At about 5 PM this evening I'll be going down to our cellar and pulling four half duck breasts (half breasts, not half duck) out from the case of salt I buried them in yesterday.  I'm going to wash them off, pat them dry, dust them all over with ground white pepper, wrap them in cheesecloth and tie them off.  Then I'm going to walk them to a secret place the mice don't know about that's cool and humid and I'm going to hang them there for a week.  During the week the duck breasts are hanging, I'll probably think about knives.  I'll think: do  I have the a knife that's really just right for what happens next?  I'll decide, No, I don't have a knife that's really just right for what happens next.  But what will I do about that?  I don't know.  I just don't know.  I'm not sure that listening to Give Blood or Smiling Black Faces over and over again will help me decide, but I'm probably gonna find out.

Yes, I find this titillating in every way

The dorkiness of the image, madam's zeppelin breasts, the water gushing so lustily from Sir's pail, the decorous arm reaching into the room with more water, and everything and everyone so hot hot hot.

Leonato, Much Ado About Nothing, Scene 1:

...O, she is fallen
Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea
Hath drops too few to wash her clean again
And salt too little which may season give
To her foul-tainted flesh!

To say nothing of Señor!  Another fabu image from the digital collection at NYPL.

But good news tonight, Roger B. Tawney is off the hook.

Juju sent a pointer to this Keith Olbermann commentary re the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. A sad event as seen from our window.  Lori's film, This Land is Your Land has a great section on corporate personhood (gack) and corporate free speech issues (gack gack).

Dear diary, let's lay it on the line about me and Dante

Uh, Clem.

Having worked with Dante Oblimov now for just about ever, I really do look at him and think, Gee, as I'm getting older I'm coming to look more and more like Dante.

Truth is, Dante hasn't had much of a life since editthispage.com folded and took the entire archive of Cabinet with it, and then weblogger.com sunk in on itself and took the environy archive with it.  No more Charlie Rose interviewing D.O., no more D.O. clothing lines, no more D.O. freeing the mermaid slaves.  Like so many heroes, Dante Oblimov is now just pretty much an image.  Or maybe D.O. is out there doing all the things he used to do, but he and I just aren't in touch the way we used to be.

In any case, reading Jaron Lanier's book is continuing to make me be just a wee bit more questioning about what I am participating in here - with or without Dante -  and just how detached or glib I might be being, and whether I ought to participate in rehashing other people's things or just scaling back to concentrate on my own things.  And can I accept just doing my own things and not posting about them?  So I'm futzing around on a couple of sites away from view, one that's only pictures, and it struck me there: How would it change my approach to MNIDOAILY if my own face was on it?

Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes...

These are two etchings by Charles Emile Jacque (1813-1894), now in the New York Public Library’s digital collection, acquired from the collection of Samuel Putman Avrery (1822-1904).  The images are digitized and on line at NYPL – digital IDs 1220758 and 1220759.  Officially “sujet libre”, but browsable under “sex”.

The 25th anniversary edition of Little Big, by John Crowley

Ron Drummand and (as) Incunabula has put together a web site (interviews, essays) celebrating the 25th anniversary of John Crowley's Little Big.

Dan Levy, who I haven't seen more than once or twice in a long time, is the person who recommended Little Big to me.   (He recommended I read Ægypt first, but I didn't. Faraway Hills is in Ægypt, and farawayhills is, sort of, where I live.  Now I'm really digressing, but there's a spur of land in the Hudson just north of Cold Spring on the east bank of the river, 41.425841,-73.969586, which I always make believe is the site of some of the parties in Ægypt.  I don't typically mention this to anyone, because, aside from Dan, I don't know anyone else who's read Ægypt: maybe I just need to ask more people if they have.)  Dan's been many web people, pretty fancy, but at the time we're talking he was Levity.) My jaw stayed dropped the entire time I read Little Big. I laughed, I cried. I mean I really wept at one point when I realized how much I identified with one of the characters and that character was now, no kidding, just dead.

You know, when I finish reading what I'm reading now, I'm going to go back and reread Little Big. Or maybe wait for the 25th anniversary printing in April.  Thank you, Incunabula.

[Well, I'm in a groove.  Let me say a little more.  David Kassel introduced me to Dan Levy, lo those many years ago, and David is the other half of a few of web projects I posted about earlier this week.  We saw D last week for the first time in a long time, and I told him then that I had a dream - a pretty horrific dream about Dan L.  OK: here's how old friends differ.  DK immediately launched the question What does that mean about you (me, Stumpy)?, whereas I was telling DK because my next question was Is everything OK with DL?

I think I'm done now.]

Tuli Kupferberg benefit at St. Ann's Warehouse this Friday evening

Help the man who helped bring you so much joyful insanity (as opposed to the other kind).  From the article at Broadwayworld:

Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and Lou Reed will join a host of others in the January 22nd concert to benefit Tuli Kupferberg. Kupferberg is an American singer songwriter and found of the band The Fugs who suffered a series of strokes in April and September 2009, leaving him blind and in need of full time nursing care. The concert will take place at St. Ann's Warehouse, Friday, January 22 at 7:30 P.M.

The full lineup will include The Fugs, John Kruth and an All Star Band, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Pete Stampfel, John Zorn. More performers have yet to be announced.

Fugs homepage.  A 1965 photo of the Fugs (meet the Fugs) by David Gahr: wow.

Dear diary, juxtapositions

Jeez, I already felt bad about the juxtaposition of the sausage post and the MLK video, and now Ted Kennedy's seat has been frittered away and my saying so right here is the top slice of bread on this sandwich of embarrassing abutments.  Oy !

I have two personal Kennedy nearnesses. One I mentioned a while back, the other is that I shook Ted's hand after a talk he gave a few years ago and really felt here is the old lion.

Can't make myself go read all of the news analysis (gack) on this, so instead I'm going through email, and there's a piece in yesterday's Secrecy News about the DoD "clarifying" it's doctrine on psychological operations.

It endorses a new, negative definition of the term “propaganda,” which had formerly been used in a neutral sense to refer to “Any form of communication in support of national objectives designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly.” From now on, propaganda will refer only to what the enemy does:  “Any form of adversary communication, especially of a biased or misleading nature, designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly.”

Bummer that the military has joined the (rest of the country) (the Senate) (your noun here) on this. 

Boy's first sausage

Mmmmm.  Chicken thigh meat, pork back fat, roasted red peppers, basil, garlic, salt, black pepper, red wine, red wine vinegar, and olive oil.

About 2 and a half pounds of it.  Just enough to get initiated.  I was working alone, so no pics of the grinding, etc...

And, because man does not live be sausage alone...

MLK, I Have a Dream